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Review: The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson — a fowl tale of mania

A strange crime reveals an even more bizarre subculture, says Robbie Millen

Robbie Millen

April 21 2018, 12:01am, The Times

37 king bird-of-paradise skins were stolen from Tring’s Natural History Museum in 2009GETTY IMAGES

You know your life has taken a wrong turn if you’re sidling up to burly men with handlebar moustaches and furtively asking: “Got any chatterer?” Kirk Wallace Johnson wasn’t cruising bachelor bars in San Francisco to score a new party drug. No, he was much more desperate. He was at the 21st International Fly-Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey, on the prowl for stolen bird feathers.

The Feather Thief truly is a tale of obsession. All the men who appear in Johnson’s enjoyable book, including the author, appear to be batty, gripped by a mania for exotic birds.

The story begins with one of the oddest heists. In 2009 Edwin Rist, a flautist studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, broke into the…